Executive Director Pete Upham shares his periodic reflections. 

December 2009

So Much to Learn

Note - a version of this reflection was delivered as a talk at the TABS 2009 Annual Conference in Chicago.

Working at a boarding school was the second most humbling job I've ever had. I say second most, because I'm a parent. Parenting is my first calling. In a sense, I just moonlight at TABS. I've been a father for seventeen years. Some might consider that sufficient practice. Yet with three kids and a fourth due in February, I confess there are some nights I lay my head down convinced I’m no better at parenting than I was the day my oldest was born.

As we all know, the family is a little school. In the academy where I live and work, the original "home-school," I play Head (at times), and by turns, Dean of Students, Algebra teacher, soccer coach, RA, chaplain, cook, housekeeper, accountant, and school nurse. Triple threat, indeed.  More like ten-fold peril. Can you imagine the premiums if parents had to carry the same liability insurance as schools?

***

Not everywhere, and not for all, but for many of our schools, it's been an uncertain, challenging, even difficult year—a year of reappraisals, reorganizations, reforms, and in some cases, reductions. All this doing over and overdoing was added to the not inconsiderable demand of simply being a good school for the students in your care. A good school: a dream daunting, inspiring, and sometimes as elusive as the desire to be a good parent.

For despite all of our science and quasi-science, our laws, our best practices, our bowing shelf of expert manuals and management tomes, there is something about your work that, terrifying as it may seem, survives on something like sheer nerve and improbable faith. The faith is not always religious, per se, but it is the faith in a future one cannot reliably forecast or even reasonably hope to expect. Things unseen. We are trying to teach people who know everything—teenagers—things they naturally find it superfluous to learn. Now in seriousness, I was a teenager who was determined to learn everything the hard way. If we're honest, weren't many of us just so constituted? In any event, my brief stint in the classroom as a teacher, and my somewhat longer stints in administration and residential life, have convinced me that what we aim to instruct in economics is quickly forgotten, in English literature frequently unattended, and in personal ethics, well, simply disregarded. Meanwhile and moreover, if your students are anything like my children, they possess an unsettling capacity to identify and probe the failures, deficits, and inadequacies of the adults in their lives. Teenagers are incredible hypocrisy detectors.

In my bleaker moments, I think what we teach we teach not to produce learning now, or even to prevent the inevitable errors, poor decisions, and moral lapses that seem intrinsic to human nature, but rather to give students a vocabulary they can use in the future to begin to make sense of their imminent—one hopes not-too crippling or colossal—mistakes.

Then again, somehow, against all odds, transformation happens every day—through our schools, at our schools, and more profoundly in many cases, after our schools. Perhaps "schools" is the wrong word, because have any of you been transformed by an institution? Not just influenced, but truly transformed? I doubt it. More likely, you've been transformed by people who knew you and loved you—knew you and loved you anyway. That's my boarding school story: how three teachers took an interest in me for really no reason at all—and under, not the guise (that would suggest deception) but rather under the necessary sign of a discipline (in my case, history, philosophy and poetry; in your case, it might be Spanish, soccer, or sculpture) began to help me discover the world and myself, and to make the crucial distinction between the two. Only later, after many of the usual detours and heartbreaks, did I come to accept the equally crucial, sometimes painful, and ultimately liberating truth of which of the two was at the center.

***

Our schools are schools of things—buildings and landscapes and smart boards and laptops. They are schools of ideas—replete with often-brilliant dialogues and impressive designs. But most of all, they are schools of people. I believe that's the secret sauce of your schools: not the new, green, science buildings; not the computerized elliptical machines; not even the curricula as carefully measured, fertilized, and manicured as the irrigated athletic fields so perfect they make me want to give up lawn care forever and trade in my mower for apartment life.

At the TABS Conference, I sat on a panel entitled Twenty Questions for 2020. Well, today, I have just one question for you: How do your schools, which I would describe as the formal expression of those things and ideas and, above all, people most likely to encourage transformation, how do your schools survive and flourish in a world that seems ever more transactional? A world that asks: I pay my money: what do I get? what do I get now?

In truth, boarding schools cannot entirely adapt to this world. We can only hope, once again unreasonably, to transform it. That's right: having reluctantly acknowledged to yourself and your colleagues that your livelihood is built on a wildly speculative premise, and that the final results of your individual effort and sacrifice are generally unseen and largely unverifiable, you are now called to persuade—educate, if you prefer—others outside our small network of communities.

***

Our work at boarding schools can be assisted by but should never be reduced to protocols, procedures, and policies—or even "value propositions," unless we're using a capital "V." To do so is to wreck the conditions for transformation. Otherwise, "assessment" of students begin to stand in for knowledge of them. [Let's not forget, our assessments for how well we prepare kids for college and for life are measured across decades and generations, not weeks or months.] Programs and facilities substitute for mentoring. Technique replaces love.

You know and love students. Some will be transformed, at uncertain times, in unexpected ways. That's about all you can count on. As my mother used to say, "You have some nerve." Your work, like a parent's, is humbling, and I believe for that very reason, exalted. Nervy, faithful, humbled, exalted: it’s the life you’ve chosen for yourself. It's the bed you’ve made. I would say "Rest assured," but in my experience, boarding school folks get little rest, so such advice might be as discordant as it is premature.  Instead, know that when that long day of your life is done, you can, in fact, rest well.

Until next time, Pete